Planners’ Picks — January 13, 2026
School is back in session next week. We’re also tapping into midpoint reviews and navigating uncertainty. Let’s January!
:: Image of the Week
:: Self-Leadership Development
Resources Roadshow Panel Discussion from LTD, OSC, and CSN
Are you exploring ways to help your team thrive? Looking for professional development opportunities for yourself or your staff? Curious about coaching or self-leadership tools available right here on campus?
Then it’s time to connect with the Resource Roadshow, a panel discussion of representatives from OHR Learning and Talent Development, the Office of Strategic Consulting, and the Campus Supervisors Network community of practice. We will cover professional development opportunities at UW-Madison related to our respective areas of expertise, most of which are free of charge to participate in:
- Personal Growth: workshops and training sessions focused on enhancing individual skills such as time management, communication, and emotional intelligence. These sessions are designed to help you and your team members achieve personal and professional goals.
- Leading and Supervising: programs that cover essential topics like effective supervision, conflict resolution, and team motivation. These programs aim to equip current and aspiring leaders with the tools they need to lead their teams successfully.
- Organizational Effectiveness: opportunities to improve organizational performance through change management, strategic planning, and process improvement, etc. These resources are tailored to help your team work more efficiently and effectively towards common goals.
Our roadshow can come to an in-person gathering or meet with your team on Zoom. Either way, you’ll learn how to grow at UW and take your team to the next level with information on individual, team, and leadership development!
Some praise for the Roadshow:
“We greatly appreciated having all of you at the meeting and being available for the Area Director team. There was significant energy around all that you shared after the conversation – Thank You.” — Jason Hausler, UW-Madison, Division of Extension
Note: This roadshow presentation is for management and director-level audiences. For more information and to discuss your specific needs, submit an intake form to our group: https://go.wisc.edu/e18g49
“Be the reason someone believes in the goodness of people.” – Karen Salawohn
‘Waking up’ to the business value of healthy masculinity with Garry Ridge
One embodied executive leader and human being that I value so much is ex-WD40 CEO Garry Ridge, who joins Garry Turner on episode #5 of the In The Business of Healthy Masculinity podcast.
A bit about Garry if you do not know him, and a reminder if you do:
Garry Ridge is the Chairman Emeritus of WD-40 Company, where he served as CEO for 25 years and was ranked No. 4 on Inc. Magazine’s World’s Top 10 CEOs. He holds a Master’s in Executive Leadership from the University of San Diego and an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from National University.
Known globally as The Culture Coach, Garry helps leaders create workplaces where people feel safe, valued, and inspired. Through his firm, The Learning Moment, he works with executives to build cultures of trust, collaboration, and purpose. He also serves on the boards of The Gorilla Glue Company and Eastridge Workforce Solutions. A bestselling author and sought-after speaker, Garry co-authored Helping People Win at Work with Ken Blanchard and wrote the USA Today bestseller Any Dumb-Ass Can Do It. Affectionately known as The Dean of Dumbassery, he champions “learning moments,” turning mistakes into opportunities for growth.
Check out this interesting conversation with Garry and Garry!
:: Work Culture & Team Development
The Secret Ingredient for Workplace Culture and Employee Experience
Why is the secret ingredient for workplace culture and employee experience so important?
Because in the ever-evolving landscape of the business world, one constant remains – the significance of hiring the right person for the job. While hiring is often viewed as a complex process with many variables, the primary reason behind many costly hiring errors is often quite simple: employers fail to take into account a fundamental aspect of a candidate’s nature – their conative instincts, and how they align with the role and impact the team.
In an era where businesses tend to emphasize cognitive abilities and affective personality traits, they frequently overlook the conative aspect of a person’s mind. This oversight can result in a misalignment between the individual and the role, culminating in dissatisfaction, poor performance and ultimately, significant costs associated with turnover and diminishing returns on culture and employee experience.
Explore conation in this article from Humanworks8. https://humanworks8.com/culture-and-employee-experience/
“Culture is what you tolerate.” – Craig Groeschel
Stop managing generations — start managing expectations
What’s the best way to manage a workforce that includes Gen Zers, millennials, Gen Xers and baby boomers, with different perspectives and value systems? Focus on expectations, HR expert Laurie Ruettimann says. Ruettimann outlines three pillars to guide your efforts.
https://www.smartbrief.com/original/stop-managing-generations-start-managing-expectations
:: Mental Health and Self-Care
In Awe of Beauty
In this short video, Doreen Gail Hemp shares her passion for noticing beauty and recalls the impact of finding a grateful perspective after one of the most painful moments of her life.
https://grateful.org/resource/in-awe-of-beauty/
“I can never find what I want, but the benefit is that I always find something else.” – Irvine Welsh
Is Optimism the Key to a Long Life?
Dick Van Dyke, a beloved cultural icon and star of classic Hollywood-produced TV and movies, is about to turn 100 years old, a milestone achievement. In this New York Times Well newsletter, he shares his secrets for longevity, many of which can also be found in his new book, 100 Rules for Living to 100: An Optimist’s Guide to a Happy Life. While some of his tips for prolonging lifespan are common sense health advice (e.g., staying active and maintaining strong social connections), two of his tips are relevant to leadership too as they hold insights for making work and life more meaningful.
1. Van Dyke stays positive and commits to “playfulness,” which he says “gives you a sense of fun and freedom.” Research also shows that staying upbeat and finding playful “levity” in the everyday reduces stress and boosts wellness.
2. Van Dyke says “yes” to things as often as he can and doesn’t try to battle against a changing world. He says, “You do really have to keep your mind open as you get older, especially to new ideas,” an attitude that keeps his brain nimble, helps him stay present in the here-and-now, and remain ever-adaptable to the future. Get the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/28/well/dick-van-dyke-health-habits.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4k8.sDMz.ueyTOLshEVgW&smid=url-share
**For more on the power of positive thinking, explore this conversation between Jon Gordon and Doug Conant about how optimism is often a key ingredient to leadership success.
:: CSN’s Book of the Week Recommendation
Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most
Learn how to reframe your time around life’s happiest moments to build days that aren’t just full but fulfilling with this “joyful guide” (Eve Rodsky, New York Times bestselling author) that is the antidote to overscheduling.
Our most precious resource isn’t money. It’s time. We are allotted just twenty-four hours a day, and we live in a culture that keeps us feeling “time poor.” Since we can’t add more hours to the day, how can we experience our lives as richer?
Based on her wildly popular MBA class at UCLA, Professor Cassie Holmes demonstrates how to immediately improve our lives by changing how we perceive and invest our time. Happier Hour provides empirically based insights and easy-to-implement tools that will allow you to:
-Optimally spend your hours and feel confident in those choices
-Sidestep distractions
-Create and savor moments of joy
-Design your schedule with purpose
-Look back on your years without regrets
Enlivened by Holmes’s upbeat narrative and groundbreaking research, Happier Hour “is filled with loads and loads of practical, evidence-based advice for how to live better by investing in what really matters. It’s the kind of book that can change your life for the better” (Laurie Santos, Yale professor and host of The Happiness Lab podcast).
:: Communication
Show, Don’t Tell: Why Your Stories Win at Work
Listen to Show, Don’t Tell: Why Your Stories Win at Work – a DisruptHR talk by Sarah Elkins – President of Elkins Consulting Inc.
Sarah is a storytelling expert and author of “Your Stories Don’t Define You; How You Tell Them Will.” She’s here to help us communicate more effectively through all areas of our work and personal lives. Stories build trust and strengthen relationships!
Her book: https://elkinsconsulting.com/books
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” – Simone Weil
:: Remote and Hybrid Work
Giving Effective Remote Feedback with Therese Huston
Providing effective feedback in the workplace is a universal struggle. And now that many of us work remotely, those feedback conversations have gotten even more challenging. Therese Huston is here to help with three worthwhile tips for giving remote feedback to peers, employees, or even your boss–that turn average performers into the hardest workers and stars into superstars. Therese Huston, author of Let’s Talk, gives us some tips.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egrVfZxmnCw
CSN is covering this book tomorrow in a Bite-Size Book Club. Resources from our session will be available online soon.
:: LinkedIn Learning
Finding Your Leadership Vocabulary with Doug Conant
In this follow-up to our first LinkedIn Learning course, Finding Your Leadership Purpose with Doug Conant, (which has reached over 88,500 learners), join Doug in this new learning pathway as he guides you through the important work of articulating your leadership beliefs and crystallizing them into a Leadership Vocabulary that you can use to influence others more effectively.
Drawing from years of experience as a top executive and the president and CEO of Campbell Soup Company, Doug teaches you how to lead with authenticity, motivate people, and express your leadership vision with greater impact.
Through a series of practical exercises and real-world examples, this course gives you a chance to create your own Leadership Vocabulary aligned with your core values and beliefs.
By the end of these modules, you’ll be equipped with the skills you need to communicate your leadership philosophy clearly and inspire high performance in your teams and organizations.
https://www.linkedin.com/learning/finding-your-leadership-vocabulary-with-doug-conant
:: Kindness in Leadership
You can be kind — and still say no.
Somewhere along the way, many of us started confusing kindness with compliance. We thought being kind meant keeping everyone happy — even if it left us exhausted. But here’s the truth — Kindness isn’t about saying yes to everything. See this short post and image from the Emotion Intelligence Network.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7390046523025362944
:: Upcoming Events
Nature, Art, and Service as Medicine with Journalist Julia Hotz
Be sure to jump start your new year with us as The Middleton Library team chats virtually with journalist and author Julia Hotz about her book The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive Power of Movement, Nature, Art, Service, and Belonging.
The Connection Cure combines diligent science reporting, moving patient success stories, and surprising self-discovery to help us discover the lasting and life-changing power of social prescribing. Traditionally, when we get sick, health care professionals ask, “What’s the matter with you?” But around the world, teams of doctors, nurses, therapists, and social workers have started to flip the script, asking “What matters to you?”
Science shows that social prescribing is effective for treating symptoms of the modern world’s most common ailments—depression, ADHD, addiction, trauma, anxiety, chronic pain, dementia, diabetes, and loneliness. By integrating age-old medicines like art, nature, movement, and volunteer service into patient’s daily lives, social prescriptions are radically changing health and healthcare in more than thirty countries. Julia Hotz travels around the world to survey them —sea-swimming lessons for depression, “culture vitamins” for anxiety, a fishing club for ADHD, a farm-based day-care for dementia, a phone-buddy program for social isolation, and many more.
As the first book on social prescribing, The Connection Cure empowers you to find, experience, and implement this revolutionary medicine in your own community. The success stories Julia finds bring a long-known theory to life: if we can change our environment, we can change our health. By reconnecting to what matters to us, we can all start to feel better.
About the Author: Julia Hotz is a solutions focused journalist based in New York. Her stories have appeared in The New York Times, WIRED, Scientific American, The Boston Globe, Time, and more. She helps other journalists report on the big new ideas changing the world at the Solutions Journalism Network. The Connection Cure is her first book.
Note: This is not a UW-Madison event.
https://libraryc.org/midlibrary/105449
January Servant Leadership Meeting—Lock-In and Lock-Through Power
Leading with courage, clarity, and compassion in a world that feels increasingly complex is no easy undertaking. In Strong Ground, Brené Brown brings her signature blend of research, storytelling, and practical wisdom to help us find stability when everything around us feels uncertain. This book isn’t just about leadership; it’s about life. It explores:
- How to stand firm in your values when challenges arise
- Why vulnerability is a strength, not a weakness
- How to build trust and resilience in yourself and your teams
- Practical tools for navigating tough conversations and staying grounded under pressure
Do any of these situations sound familiar?
- You’re laser-focused on getting epic stuff done and suddenly startled by a knock on your door
- You leave a tough meeting feeling grumpy after navigating challenging personalities, only to get into an argument at home
- You’re asked a question while still mentally stuck on the previous task and you’re not fully present
- You switch tasks so often that the quality of your work sometimes suffers
This month, Tracy Mrochek and Rich Gassen will dive into Chapter 18 of Brené Brown’s book Strong Ground and explore what it means to be locked-in and why locking-through matters.
Together, we’ll discuss:
- How to protect our locked-in power without losing connection.
- How to find strong ground by being “tough and tender,” as well as being locked in and locking through.
- How these concepts align with servant leadership principles and why they matter for creating trust and resilience in our teams.
We’re also sharing a short video segment on what strong ground means to Brené in leadership. And, we touch on a couple of other topics she covers in this great read.
This chapter from her book is saved as an audio recording, found here:
https://brenebrown.com/podcast/lock-in-and-lock-through-power
We also scanned a copy of chapter 18, and provided some supporting resources, located here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1FtXVgCpkJGd8zeuJx3G6hmqLgRvOAbdZ?usp=sharing
Lastly, here is an interview between Brené and Adam Grant, where she explains the origins of strong ground. It’s worth listening to, so you are grounded in our conversations!
(This link starts at [12:36], and you should listen to about [29:00]: Definition of Strong Ground using the Tush Push as an example.)
https://youtu.be/nbSC4kmdHSc?si=2rikYTSdAg43CCIo&t=1236
**
This session’s Discussion Questions:
- What does “locked-in” mean to you in your daily life? How does it help and/or hinder?
- When have you experienced the tension between staying focused and being available for others? How did you handle it?
- What strategies can we use to “lock-through” without sacrificing our locked-in power? What strategies have you used and what has worked the best?
- How does the concept of locking-in and locking-through connect to servant leadership values like empathy, listening, and stewardship?
Additional Questions for you to ponder with a friend:
- What does mental toughness mean to you and how do you engage in recovery?
- How as servant leaders can we straddle the paradox with the people we work with to develop the toughness necessary to do hard things along with the tenderness required to thrive?
- How do you determine when deep focus is worthwhile and when it is not worth the investment?
- How can we create team norms that respect both deep focus and accessibility?
Date: January 16, 2026
Time: 8:30-10:00 am CST